You are able to see an object because light reflects from the object into your eyes, which send the data to your brain so it can process the data and form an image. You can’t see without light—honest! Just as in nature, illumination in 3ds Max happens through a complex interaction of lights and objects.

Light can come from a number of sources, the most obvious being the sun, our source of natural lighting, and from bulbs, which handle our real-world artificial lighting. It makes sense, then, that 3ds Max also provides a number of lighting options that allow you to replicate both natural and artificial lighting within scenes.

This hour, you are going to take a look at the various lighting options available to you and how you can use them to illuminate your 3D worlds and scenes.

3ds Max Lighting Introduction

Lights in the real world allow you to see things, and the lights in 3ds Max do exactly the same thing. In addition, you can assign qualities to the lighting tools available in 3ds Max to enable them to cast shadows, project images, and even manipulate the atmospheric lighting effects.

The basic lighting tools are located in the default creation area in 3ds Max—the Create tab of the Command Panel. The Lights category is the third icon from the left, which looks like a studio spotlight; this category is home to the lighting tools.

Two main subcategories of lights are available: standard lights and photometric lights. You can create lights just as you do any other objects, and you can also transform them by using the Move, Rotate, and Scale tools.

Before you jump in and start creating lights, it’s important that you know that 3ds Max automatically provides a default lighting setup when you start the program. Read on to learn more.

Default Lighting

3ds Max provides you with default lighting if you have not specified (created) any lights yourself. This allows you to view any objects you create without having to worry about lighting the scene first. The default lights disappear as soon as another light is created, and they magically reappear if all other lights in the scene are deleted.

Shadows

Shadows are areas where light is obstructed by an object, causing a darker area than its surroundings. 3ds Max supports various types of shadow-casting options, and unlike in real life, you have the ability to make only some lights cast shadows and others not. Work through the following Try It Yourself to get a taste of this.

Try It Yourself: Casting Shadows Using Default Lighting

Follow these steps to see how the default lighting in 3ds Max casts shadows on objects you create:

In a new scene, create a plane (a standard primitive, not an aircraft).

Create a sphere.

Move the sphere around to see how the default lighting in 3ds Max casts shadows onto objects.

Ambient Light

Ambient light is general lighting that affects an entire scene; it is also called global ambient. It has no source or direction but affects everything in a scene uniformly. Because ambient light has an effect on everything, you can use it to your advantage to create a specific atmosphere or simply to adjust the overall color of a scene.

Figure 10.1 shows the Environment and Effects window, where you can manually adjust the ambient light for a scene.

FIGURE 10.1 The Environment and Effects window gives you access to the ambient light properties for each scene.

NOTE

Changing the Global Ambient Light Settings

You can press the 8 key to bring up the Environment and Effects window, where you can adjust the Ambient setting. Alternatively, you can open this window by selecting Rendering, Environment from the main menu.

It is incredibly simple to change the Global Lighting options in a 3ds Max scene, and these steps show you how to do just that:

In a new scene, create some standard primitives or simply open a scene that you have worked on previously that includes some geometry.

Open the Environment and Effects window by either pressing the 8 key on your keyboard or selecting Rendering, Environment from the main menu. As shown in Figure 10.1, the Environment and Effects window contains two tabs that separate the Environment and Effects options. You need to worry about only the first tab (Environment) for now.

Ensure that the Environment tab is open and find the Common Parameters rollout, which should be right at the top. The first section of this rollout contains options for changing and affecting the background of the main scene.

Scroll down the Common Parameters rollout until you come to the Global Lighting options.

Find the Tint option under Global Lighting and click the white square to bring up a color picker.

Manipulate and choose a color by using the color picker. Notice that your scene objects are tinted in the color you are choosing. As you can see, changing this color can have a dramatic effect on the visual look of a scene.

Change the Level option in this section to intensify or decrease the effect that the tint has on the scene. Also try out the Ambient option, which behaves just like the Tint effect. (The effect of the Ambient option is hard to see in your viewports, but you can see it in renders quite easily. You’ll learn about renders and rendering in Hour 12, “Rendering for Production,” so make a note of where this ambient light setting is so you can find it again in a few hours.)